Here are the click counts July 1 - July 25: Adwords: 1084 clicks Yahoo: 297 clicks Affiliate: 574 clicks (107 sales) Adsense: 172 clicks Now, depending on what you want to call a conversion: 107/1381 = .077 (about 1 in 13) With adsense: 279/1381 = .20 (about 1 in 5) CTR on my landing page: 746/1381 = 54% (about 1 in 2) Honestly, this campaign is sucking my entire budget right now. I put everything I have into it, so there is nothing left to spend elsewhere. However, I haven't heard of any other ad network outside of google,yahoo, and msn that is worth it. I've thought about maybe classifieds - not online, but in print. Maybe a half or full page ad on the back. Super expensive stuff, and now way to test the waters first like adwords.
Wow a 54% CTR on your landing page. Very good job with the design. I do have a question, why are you putting adsense on your LP? Does it pay more than your click cost? Have you tried removing the adsense and seeing if your sales for the affiliate product you were promoting increased?
I just design websites and put adsense on them out of habit. The click costs more than what I get from an adsense click. I might remove the adsense in August to see what happens. So 172 clicks to adsense, what if 1/2 of those clicked my affiliate instead? That would be 86 clicks to my affiliate. Now my affiliate converts at 107/574 or about 1 in 5. Following this logic 86/5 = 17 17 x $55/sale = $935. Way more than adsense would pay. hmmmm...... Maybe dump the adsense tonight!
I'd run one week without Adsense and compare results. Actually, it's almost a common knowledge that you must not distract visitors in any way, remove navigation, no Adsense or other adverts - you buy clicks and you don't want them go anywhere but fill out a form - in your case.
PLR = Private Label Content. This is basically content you can buy like articles, graphics, and ebooks...then put your name on it as if you were the author. I use PLR for most of my sites, but you can pull free syndicated content from ezinearticles.com. The downside of doing that is you have to leave the author's links in the article and you have no way of further optimizing the article for your keywords. I use infogoround.com. I did a review with screen shots, check out my sig.
That's good advice, thanks. I've pulled all the adsense off one of the landing pages, my biggest performing one, last night. Let's see how we do by next Friday. I'll post the results here as usual. Oh, I did leave the google search box at the very bottom. The number of people clicking on anything at the bottom of the page is extremely small as I do track where people are clicking.
Okay, I have the some initial results for you since removing the adsense off the landing page. I have to say it feels good so far, but lets look at the numbers. Adwords: 115 clicks - $258.28 Yahoo: 74 clicks - $208.53 Affiliate Clicks - 83 Affiliate Sales - 27 $1195.00 CTR % - 83/189 = 44% Conversions: 27/189 = 14% (about 1 in 7) Net Profit: $728.19 This is showing a 5% increase in clicks to the affiliate since removing the adsense. In theory, a 5% increase should equate to about 75 more clicks to my affiliate per month. If I continue to convert at 1 in 7, that's 10 more sales or about $500 more per month, or a net profit of $500 * .70 (ROI) = $350 Compared to adsense of about $197, I should make $153 more next month than I would if I left adsense on the page. Now I'm basing this on just 2 days of data after removing the adsense. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues over 30 days when I have 1000+ clicks to analyze. Although the initial results are promising, I think what these numbers really show is that if people don't click on your affiliate link, they leave. So putting adsense on the page does not affect your bottom line as much as you might think. When I'm doing about $8000 in gross commissions, a $153 difference is not really significant. Anyway, like I said, the statistical sample is extremely small and time will tell. I'll revisit these numbers in 30 days and post the results. I just wanted to give you a all a heads up of how the first couple days went.
lol i know, I tried last year with adword but i was getting only a few bucks in return for my investment and since then i've stopped but now i feel tempted to try again
rob6188 i got a simple question, when u started out did google charged you before cj paid you because both take about a month?
Google charges me every few days, whenever I hit $500 in charges. CJ pays about the 20th of the following month. So I have to front all of the costs before getting paid. I just put it on my credit card then pay it off when I get paid from cj.
Hi Rob, Thanks for sharing this. I noticed that your earning was increasing dramatically compare to the time you start. How you do that? Do you simply increase bidding on converting keywords to get more clicks? What else you do to increase number of clicks? In fact, I faced some difficulties to get more clicks. If I increase bidding, I am not profitable any more. Any ideas?
I've noticed that on new campaigns, particularly if your running on the content network in adwords, it takes google a few days to ramp up your impressions throughout the network. So don't be disappointed if you're not getting too many impressions in the first week. This is assuming of course that you have a very tight (short list of keywords) adgroup. Make sure you optimize your landing page, ad content and keywords. Basically put your keyword in the title of the ad and the url. Ad: Refinancing Loans Fill out a simple application Fast Free quotes in minutes. www.lendingarea.com/refinancing-loans.htm Keyword: Refinancing loans home refinancing loans etc.... Landing Page: Meta title, description, keywords: i.e. <title> Home Refinancing Loans </title> Heading 1 or 2: <h1> Home Refinancing Loans </h1> Outbound links: <a href="http://vendorswebsite.com" Refinancing Loans</a> Inbound links from other pages on your site to the landing page: <a href="http://lendingarea.com" Refinancing loans</a> Bold text in body content/article: <b> Refinancing Loans</b> Image alt text on your images "refinancing loans" Then I analyze the clicks. Which keywords are getting the most clicks? Is there a corresponding day that I get more sales or did I waste money on those keywords? I hear there are some great tracking programs available that will tell you what site and keyword actually converted into a sale. but since my keyword lists are very short, and I use the content network, I don't want to spend the money for one. I'm learning php now and will figure it out myself soon. Once I have a simple tracking program made, I might sell it for like $10, not the $150+ I see around the net (granted they seem much more powerful than what I'm thinking of doing). I also looked at what days and the times that I got conversions. I ended up showing my ads only between 9:00am and 12:00am midnight california time. I also stopped showing ads on Saturday altogether. This saved me about $20 a day plus $100 each Saturday. I was getting clicks but no conversions in the wee hours of the morning and Saturdays were a complete bust as well. Strangely, Sundays do very well.??? GOLDEN TIP: Then I look at where the traffic is comming from using the adwords "Placement Performance" report. (see page 8 of this thread). I excluded sites that were not targeted to my landing page like pogoaddiction.com and myspace.com. Why waste spending money on clicks from those sites. The odds of conversion are much lower, vs. a site like zillow.com. Finally, I removed the adsense from my landing page this week. Results are promising, but not enough data yet. REALITY CHECK: I setup my sister using almost identical ads, keywords, and landing page. The only major difference was that she did not get approved for lendintree (yet). So we went with lowermybills.com. In fact, I'm managing her adwords/adsense account directly and built the website. Sadly, she is now $130 in the hole. The problem is that lowermybills.com is not converting anywhere near the rate of lendingtree. Also, they only pay $25/lead instead of $55. If they were paying $55, she'd be way ahead right now. Good news is her epc is looking good on the cj network, so lendingtree may approve her later. We are going to build up her history so her numbers look good when she re-applies. We are going to try another affiliate this month, that I hope will convert better. So yes, I'm doing extremely well, and no I could not duplicate the success with another affiliate for my sister. But I'm close and very confident I can get her account profitable this month. I wish I had more time, right now I'm working on a contract that will take up most of my time until the end of august. It's nice to know that at least this one campaign is running and making money all by itself now. All I'm doing now is updated my spreadsheets and posting the results in this forum. July was a fabulous month, and I expect August to do even better with all the little tweaks I've done. June Net Profit: $1514 (see page 5 of this thread) July: Adwords: $3250.17 (1,416 clicks) Yahoo: $1025.63 (435 clicks) Adsense: $199.13 Affiliate: $7360.00 July Net Profit: $3283.33 ROI: 3283.33/(3250.17+1025.63) = 77% Conversions: 152/(1416+435) = 8% (about 1 in 12) Well, I'm off now. Gonna walk the dogs, work on my tan by the pool, then go work on my contract. I've also got a thread going for dc metro area members http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=3919198#post3919198. I'd like to get together this weekend for a social.
I haven't read all of the thread - but have read most of it and it has some quality information. People should note that Rob isn't saying this is an easy task as it does carry a risk factor. So anyone wanting to try and replicate this success should be careful before throwing too much money into a campaign. I guess a few summary tips on what to consider when trying out a campaign. 1) Already be registered and in good standing with cj (or your affiliate programme) - so that you stand a good chance to be approved onto high paying affiliate opportunities. 2) Do thorough research on the niche market and have a large amount of keywords/groups ready to try out - however, when starting with adwords do not start off and throw everything into it straight away as it may take some time for you to get the right balance for each campaign. 3) Do not get carried away with any '1-day' results... instead look into those results and see if there is anything that may help you refine and improve your campaign to be able to replicate that success on a regular basis. 4) Play by the rules... for adwords, for cj and for the affiliate terms of service... a large amount of cash can look really nice on paper but will look better in your bank account and future bank statements. I am sure many people will have learned some things from reading the thread and I just thought I would add that people have to bear in mind that Rob is experienced in this area and therefore more confident and knowledgable on the steps he needs to take to improve things (and what results to analyse etc). In order for people to achieve similar success they will need to be patient and to know how to interpret their data so they can refine and improve their campaigns. Anyway, good luck to anyone starting out their venture - maybe one day I will get into this myself, but for now got too many other things to worry about to start something like this.